BEFORE: Owen Wilson carries over again from "Wonder", and this will mark his 8th appearance here in Movie Year 12, and as I'm only about a month away from the 2/3 checkpoint for the year, that's not a bad place for him to be. Maya Rudolph also has 8 appearances, so they're tied for the lead, but neither actor appears in any other films currently on my watchlist, as far as I can tell. There are always uncredited cameos, and archive footage appearances in documentaries, so I never really know this for sure.
Speaking of which, I can announce my planned topic for my documentary break in July - once again I've got a backlog of music documentarys, of course I tend to lean towards classic rock, but there will be some soul mixed in there too - plus those two documentaries about the Fyre concert disaster a couple years ago, so I'm thinking of this as a Summer Concert series, since right now we don't even know if there will be rock concerts IRL this summer. Maybe some in NYC if coronavirus recovery continues in a positive direction, but for the states that opened too early and may face closures due to a second wave, not so much.
And speaking of closures, of course I felt bad a few weeks back when they announced that there would be no San Diego Comic Con this year, partly because it's not safe to have so many people gathered together during a pandemic, social distancing would be impossible in that convention center, and anyway they've been using that building to house homeless people, so think of how badly that building would need cleaning and disinfecting first. (The joke I told about using the Javits Center, the annual site of New York Comic-Con, as a Covid-19 field hospital, was that things would be different this year - usually they have to disinfect the Javits AFTER Comic-Con...). Look, I get how much of a hassle it would be, I worked at that convention for about 15 years in a row, and I usually came home sick afterwards with a cold I'd caught either at the Convention Center or on the plane ride. One year I got a UTI, perhaps from using a public restroom there or in an airport.
But word came out today that the 2020 San Diego Comic-Con is back on. Sort of. It will be a virtual edition, so they'll be screening on-line much of the same programming and panels that they would have presented in person, and now nobody will catch Covid or cooties or the nerd flu, they can hold a virtual cosplay contest and screen trailers for next year's big movies and all that. Sure, it's kind of hard to buy an autograph from a famous sci-fi actor this way, but it's a bold move for an event that usually has to limit the number of badges it sells, and now there's no limit to how many people could tune in for a FREE virtual convention. They could have millions of people watching this year, which is also great publicity if they break some kind of record, plus they're preserving their brand and not just rolling over and cancelling their season, like some sports organizations I could name. (By the time Major League Baseball figures out whether they can have a shortened 2020 season or not, it will probably be time to plan spring training for 2021...)
I stopped going out to San Diego in 2017, it just became too much physical work for me as I was getting close to 50 - I realized running a booth at a convention is something of a young man's game. Plus our booth hadn't been profitable in a while, once you factor in airfares and hotel costs, shipping all the merchandise out there, shipping back what didn't sell, and paying for the booth, which got more expensive every year. Plus that last year really pissed me off, a lot of the rules got changed around, I argued with staff members who didn't know as much as I did about their own procedures, and I ended up in a foul mood, and with duct tape holding my pants together on the last day. (Long story...). But a free virtual convention this July? Yeah, I may just have to sign up and see what that's all about.
THE PLOT: Three kids hire a low-budget bodyguard to protect them from their high-school bully.
AFTER: Hey, there's footage from "The Untouchables" movie that appears in this film, so I'm going to credit both Kevin Costner and Robert De Niro with an appearance - and that means that De Niro has also appeared in 8 films so far this year, and we've got a three-way race! This just got a little more interesting. Of course, if I had watched "Hall Pass" as originally planned, Owen Wilson would be in the lead by himself, but I still say I made the right call by re-scheduling that film for next February.
Well, this really expands on the conversation of bullying that I started last night - in this film three high-school freshman find themselves being bullied by the same two upper-classmen, only really there's one alpha dog and I guess the other kid is the beta. Only one kid ever gets accused in the principal's office, and that kid, for some reason, is always given the chance to deny it and for some other unknown reason, the principal always believes him. This seemed a little far-fetched after a while, but then, we have to remember that 2008 was a different time - not every kid had a smart-phone with the ability to record video back then. Bullied kids today have a big advantage, they could just record their bully doing something wrong, or have another kid snap a video of the beatdown taking place, and boom, instant evidence to show to the principal.
We've also seen a social shift since then, I think, with many schools adopting zero tolerance policies in recent years. Plus, if the bullied kid is any particular ethnic group, then it becomes a hate crime, and an older high-school kid could be looking at some real jail time or even some financial liability. On top of all THAT, kids today also have the power of social media at their fingertips, so going public with their bullying could really get the word out about their unfortunate situation, and could bring everyone in town rushing to their defense. But in "Drillbit Taylor", mired in the social politics of 2008, these kids never think to ask for help from the online community, but if they'd just thought outside the box a little more, they could have alerted a local news reporter, who could have been willing to champion their cause, even if it was just for the ratings. If the principal's in your way, go around the principal and expose the bully in the news, and also mention how the principal's done nothing to stop it - it's a hell of an idea.
But instead the kids here pool their money and hire a bodyguard - sure, because schools allow that sort of thing all the time, bodyguards walking around the school, protecting three of the kids but not others. Who is this adult, and why is he walking around the halls between classes? Could be a sexual predator, better get him out of there. The guy they hire, "Drillbit" Taylor, is actually a homeless veteran, but he talks enough of a good game to convince these kids that he's on the level, with both fighting experience and the willingness to protect them around the clock, but really he's planning to rob their homes with his other street-people friends. In the meantime, he lives in the woods, takes showers at the beach and hits the kids up for bowls of cereal after every training session. Drillbit is really hoping to get enough money together so he can travel up to northern Canada, where he can make a fresh start - there are rumors that if you travel far enough north, the country will just give you some land if you're willing to live on it.
Drillbit's initial advice was to befriend their bully, who's probably acting out to overcome some kind of personal dissatisfaction with himself, and find some common ground and shared interest, which is really not a bad plan. As I said yesterday, fighting a bully doesn't work, snitching on a bully doesn't work (unless you go REALLY big with that hate-crime stuff) so the common ground thing might be the best bet - only it doesn't work here when one of the geek teens beats him too badly in a rap battle. So Drillbit initiates Phase 2, which involves following the teens around and pretending to be a substitute teacher at the school. Umm, bit NITPICK POINT here, nobody in the school administration checks this guy's paperwork? Doesn't anyone realize that he's not on the school's payroll, nobody knows his real name or had him fill out a W-4 form? The school would be in huge trouble if it became known that they let an uncertified stranger interact with their kids, so there would no doubt be systems in place to prevent this.
And what are the chances that all three lead characters here would have absent parents, or at least parents who didn't take a very active role in knowing where their kids are after school, and who they're hanging out with? Speaking as a former teen geek myself, I had a very over-protective mother who was very clear that I had to come home straight after school, I couldn't even go hang out at another kid's house without permission, I had to come home first. (My mother taught music in elementary schools a couple towns away, but my grandmother was always there to make sure I came home on time.). I guess it's been a mixed bag for parental concern in movies lately, the parents in "Booksmart" and "Love, Simon" were rather hands-off, but in "Good Boys" and "The 15:17 to Paris" they were more like helicopter parents, and then in "Beautiful Boy" the father was extremely controlling, until a certain point anyway. Way on the other end of the spectrum was "River's Edge", where all parents were nearly non-existent and all the teenagers just did whatever they wanted.
Meanwhile, Drillbit (or as he's known at the school, "Dr. Illbit") gets romantically involved with an English teacher at the school, the relationship goes well until she reveals her history of falling for "loser" guys and liars, and of course he's both. This is pretty formulaic, even for a story that was originally written by John Hughes, a man who practically demanded that every character be some kind of walking stereotype (think how archetypical everyone was in "The Breakfast Club"). You can almost predict exactly how this whole scenario is going to fall apart, but at least there were a couple of nice surprises in the climax and the denouement. As they often say to bullied teens these days, don't worry, it gets better. (But, does it though? Surely not for everybody?)
Also starring Nate Hartley (last seen in "Movie 43"), Troy Gentile (last seen in "Nacho Libre"), David Dorfman (last seen in "The Singing Detective"), Alex Frost (last seen in "The Most Hated Woman in America"), Josh Peck (last seen in "The Wackness"), Leslie Mann (last seen in "Welcome to Marwen"), Danny McBride (last heard in "The Angry Birds Movie 2"), Stephen Root (last seen in "Selma"), Ian Roberts (last seen in "The House"), Lisa Lampanelli (last seen in "The Last Laugh" (2016)), Lisa Ann Walter (last seen in "Killers"), Hynden Walch (last heard in "Teen Titans GO! to the Movies"), Valerie Tian (last seen in "21 Jump Street"), Beth Littleford (also last seen in "Movie 43"), David Bowe (last seen in "Cheaper by the Dozen"), Cedric Yarbrough (last seen in "The Boss"), Robert Musgrave, Shaun Weiss, Steven Brill (last seen in "Sandy Wexler"), Mary-Pat Green (last seen in "In Her Shoes"), Mary Pat Gleason (last seen in "Fat Man and Little Boy"), Casey Boersma, Dylan Boersma, Da'Vone McDonald, Jareb Dauplaise (last seen in "My Life in Ruins"), Robert Allen Mukes, Tichina Arnold (last seen in "Top Five"), Jerry Minor (last seen in "Junebug"), Barry Sigismondi, Steve Bannos, with cameos from Adam Baldwin (last seen in "Filmworker"), Matt Besser (last seen in "Between Two Ferns: The Movie"), Kevin Hart (last heard in "The Secret Life of Pets 2"), Rance Howard (last seen in "The 'Burbs"), David Koechner (last seen in "Still Waiting..."), Chuck Liddell, Matt Walsh (last seen in "Other People"), Frank Whaley (last seen in "Hustlers"), and archive footage of Kevin Costner (last seen in "The Highwaymen"), Robert De Niro (last seen in "Joker"), Edward Norton (last seen in "Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind"), Brad Pitt (last seen in "The Tree of Life").
RATING: 4 out of 10 bowls of Cap'n Crunch
No comments:
Post a Comment